We Used to Be Friends (And Even Back Then)
by DanteBeatrice77
Summary: A one-shot about Jane Rizzoli's predawn raid rituals. Rizzles.


**A/N: A one shot originally posted on my Tumblr.**

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Pre-dawn raids counted on the element of surprise for success. Infant morning hours usually provided the backdrop for them: those moments that few civilians saw, no purples, oranges, or other impurities in an inky sky. In fact, it was in these hours that the SWAT teams deployed saw their most rousing triumphs, when their uniforms bled into the atmosphere and the crunch of their boots on the pavement punctuated the sighs of wet, early morning air. Yes, these operations banked on complete assimilation into the darkness before the jagged interruption of it all.

Young Jane preferred them to the at-dawn raids of her vice unit past. She had spent too long in waiting, in anticipation and a coffee-induced jitter, before jolting into action at six am. When she first graduated to homicide, they raided at two, and she fell into a groove: eat dinner with the guys at five, return to the station and build strategy until eight, catch a few z's down in lockup, wake up around ten and then march into the empty locker room. There, she would dive into the minutia of preparation. She supposed that it was all related to her way of dealing with trauma and violence – compartmentalizing the shit out of things until she no longer needed to grapple with the consequences of them.

For every crackle of Velcro on her Kevlar vest, first at the left obliques, and then at the right, she quieted the possibility of the not-so-routine, a fallen comrade, a bullet to the body, the escape of their suspect. When she lifted it over her head, she always fastened each side at the same time, quickly and with practice. Young Jane thrived among the melodic drip of the last faucet behind the lockers, and the shuffle of her boots, each step the same in the row where locker number 9 was housed.

The routine, however, morphed as Jane grew older, moving from her twenties to her thirties. She was wiser, more practiced, more muscled, and generally stood more comfortable in her tall frame and wild black hair, sure. But the main difference? Maura Isles. As they grew closer, the other woman weaved her way into pre-dawn preparation without so much as a hiccup.

It started with Jane inviting Maura to eat with her, Frost, and Korsak at their usual diner. Jane ordered her pre-raid dinner of over easy eggs, bacon, hashbrowns, and a short stack, all washed down with two cups of black coffee. Maura, cobb-salad-ordering Maura, looked on in equal parts admiration and horror, her previous view that _she_ had been the one to splurge roundly shattered by the orders of her three colleagues. Jane laughed softly at her unease, reminding her that they probably wouldn't eat for the next twelve hours and she needed to carb-load. Maura shook her head in dismay and added that Jane needed to make time to eat in the next twelve hours: for someone whose body was such a work of art, Jane's blatant disregard for timely nutrition flabbergasted her.

Jane had blushed.

Frost and Korsak had made sure to shovel so much food in their mouths so as to avoid all possibility of fitting a foot in them. They then all did return to draw up a schematic of their raid with SWAT team leaders, but rather than sleep a wink, Jane returned with Maura to her office, the morgue empty of techs at such an hour, and they talked until the detective had to drag herself from their camaraderie to the stuffy air of the lockers.

This in and of itself became a script that they followed. It, too, slowly changed as the friendship between the two women grew. Once, Maura followed Jane upstairs, kept her company while she changed, and it made Jane feel empowered when she and her colleagues busted a human trafficking ring in Southie. It stayed like this for several raids thereafter.

Slowly, though, Maura's face began to change when they spent late nights on the wooden bench in between Jane's row: shadows climbed across her face, she grew quiet, even a little melancholy. Jane knew the look, had seen it in her mother's eyes a thousand times. It was the look of fear for her life. She saw countless scenarios depicting her own death play out on the medical examiner's features, and the closer they drew to one another, the more detailed she could see those scenarios becoming.

"Maura," she had breathed when she had had enough, and the other woman looked up to her with longing and sadness. She continued. "Trust me."

"What?" the pathologist asked, bewildered, thinking perhaps that she had missed some important interplay between them.

"Trust me that nothing is going to happen to me," Jane said. She smiled when she sat next to Maura, bumping her shoulder.

"You can't promise that," in a situation usually reserved for sarcasm and laughing it off, Maura rolled the dice with her vulnerability. Maybe she really did trust Jane, enough to show her how worried she'd become.

Jane didn't address that comment. "Trust me to be the best one out there. Trust me to be the closer, trust me to shut it down in the ninth, even if the bases are loaded and a well-placed hit could send us all home losers," she said, a little bit of Boston accent seeping through when she grabbed Maura's hand.

It soothed the other woman. "You want to know how I know I've been spending too much time with you?"

The detective's heart fell a little bit at the insinuation, but played along nonetheless. "How?"

"I understood all that."

Jane knew there were parts that Maura did not understand, however. She knew that anxiety quivered below the surface any time she and the guys had to bust doors down.

But then the shooting happened.

More accurately, Jane shot herself to save her brother and her best friend. And, ironically after that, Maura started to understand. Of course there was the mania of almost losing a loved one, and the paranoia that followed in the recent events afterwards, but the medical examiner soon settled into something deeper than all of that.

And suddenly pre-dawn raids weren't so scary to her anymore. She ate with the detectives more heartily than before, and her office was still open to Jane before she needed to suit up. They talked and laughed, long and loud, and then, when it was time, they wandered into the BPD women's locker room as Jane continued her protocol – still meticulous, still safe, as safe as it could possibly be.

Gone were the quiet despondencies from Maura's Irish eyes, and the worried frowns from her lips. Their routine evolved again, and sadness left from it: Jane knew it was because, more gracefully than she had ever seen anyone before, Dr. Isles had accepted the distinct potential of Jane's death. She accepted as a part of her life, her service, her person. That potential death was what infused her friend with vitality, strength, purpose – and rather than be broken by its possibility, Maura thrived in its effects. She reveled in the detective's existence, the entirety of which was a gamble.

Jane valued this gratefulness and acceptance, so much so that, for the first time in her life, she opened herself up to intimacy of her own accord. To Maura, this hot-blooded uncertainty made it impossible to refrain from touching her, and to Jane, being known, being seen, left her open to being touched by the one person who did know and see her.

It started with a particularly stressful case that even necessitated police infiltration. A compound of drugs and racketeering, run by a recently resurging Italian mafia, called friends from Detective Rizzoli's childhood into question: friends that had possibly murdered another close acquaintance of hers. She was not as light on her feet at their meal, nor was she as vocal at the meeting with SWAT to orchestrate a swift and painless operation. Maura sensed her own need to talk, to let Jane just listen, rather than contribute when they retreated to her office, and when they made it to the sticky air of the locker room, buzzing with the sallow light of the fluorescents above, her friend had gone mute. So, asking nothing, demanding nothing, she ran her hands along the shoulders of her seated friend and began to rub. Those shoulders tensed, then slumped at the contact. Jane was so warm under her fingers, so pliant with each caress of taut muscle, and Maura dropped her forehead to the crown of black hair that did no moving for a long while.

From there, the levee broke. The medical examiner would remove Jane's blazer, hang it in locker 9, and then fasten the Kevlar on those broad shoulders with affection. Her fingertips would admire the stitching, the brutally Spartan handiwork of the vest, and then her palms would come to rest on the chest of it, and she would wish her friend luck.

Despite its stark difference from her earlier raid preparations, Jane counted it all as routine just the same. She came to depend on those surgeon's hands running lovingly over the _POLICE_ typedacross her front, as though the act alone bestowed on her vest all of its protective power. It made sense, she reasoned to herself, with Maura being the far stronger of the two of them.

One night, at about midnight, though, it all changed. Dr. Isles added one single, small, unrepeatable action to the routine, one that would alter their lives so drastically, and yet, if Jane thought about it, not really at all. Their outside life, never having bled into these moments until now, came crashing into the room like a tidal wave.

It came as deft hands finished the final adjustment of the bulletproof vest onto her torso. They smoothed imaginary lines, and then uncharacteristically wandered to the back of a Sicilian neck, tendons warm and bridled just below the rippling surface. They scratched lightly at the hairline there, and Jane closed her eyes, let herself be pulled into an embrace, Maura's lips touching her ear.

"Remember, those years ago, when you asked me to trust you? Trust you to be the closer, to be the best?" Maura whispered.

"Yeah," croaked Jane, not daring to break the comfort of the moment by opening her eyes. "I remember."

"I do," Said Maura, simply.

"You do?" Jane asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear it anyway.

"Yes. I trust you with everything. You are my best friend, my closest confidant, the _only_ one I have ever been able to trust like this," the words in reply bled into the soft circles against soft hands at her back. Jane couldn't tell which was more comforting, or when Maura had moved to thread her arms under her own. The open palms against her shoulders felt vulnerable and soft, but strong. Like they wanted her to know something but would continue to hold her if she got it terribly wrong. Still, the possibility shook her foundations.

"Not even Ian or Jack?" she deflected, and the warm reprimand in Maura's eyes said she knew it.

"They knew me in ways you haven't," purred the doctor. The consequent melding of her pelvis to the detective's signaled the climax of whatever this conversation was and it made her statement decidedly sexual. "But that one part they had, it's yours. It always has been yours, it will always be yours, and it _should_ be yours," Maura locked eyes with Jane, finally, and then dragged the both of their gazes downwards, downwards… until they saw the site of their union and exhaled, shuddered, at the sight and all its potential. "And I will be waiting for you to come and get it." With that, Jane received a kiss on the shoulder for luck, and a view of the retreating Dr. Maura Isles.

Surprise, surprise.


End file.
